I finished ME 3 Ext Cut + Leviathan yesterday for the first time, and clearly, after the public outcry, I expected much more from the allegedly improved ending.

I really like the whole universe they created with the series, the various alien species, and how everybody tells you some of their story, if you want to listen.
Which brings me to my first point:

Delta123456789 posted...
we don't even know how James does on his N7 training or if Garrus retries becoming a Spectre (regardless of whether we care about these things).

Which is especially weird, as they did it for some characters, even in a very short form: eg Wrex is shown his baby.
What was the point in creating everybody's history, family background and whatnot, when they do not bother to end their stories.

Delta123456789 posted...
If you want to talk plot-holes, the moving of the Citadel to earth seems a much bigger one. The whole first game was spent gaining access to it and stressing it as the seat of galactic power, yet come the ending it is moved as it was nothing, with little comment. If the reapers could take it that easily they really should have done it earlier.

I do not want to argue, whether this makes sense.
It just ruined a good portion of the game for me: How many times through the series has Shepard defended and saved the council and the countless people on board, listened to their conversations, did uninspired fetchquests to improve their lives etc etc.
But when Shepard is away, finally getting rid of that annoying cyberninja, the reapers just slaughter everybody onboard offscreen without comment; the teenage refuge who has been talking to the turian guard, the batarian priest, the traumatized asari commando and of course the council, which Shepard has saved (or not) several times in the past.
Shepards wades through their faceless corpses for a short time, but does not seem to mind (while she was sad, that she could not save Earth and Thessia).

grand_commander posted...
in ME3 Starchild tells Shepard how it's gonna be and Shepard decides which of Starchild's ideas sounds the neatest.
I don't know if the Extended Cut makes it sound any more palatable, but Bioware made a point of showing how all of Shepard's work against the Reapers in ME2 and uniting the galaxy in ME3 means precisely squat without following Starchild's lead.
Another issue was that it wasn't clear star kid was just a rogue AI, so you got a god/lump of space magic coming along and saying synthetic war is inevitable even though you just averted it with the Geth, with no affirmation it was an insane AI talking out of somewhere unpleasant.

Starchild says, it cannot go on like this. Could he not realized that when Shepard beat Sovereign and Harbinger? When she united the whole galaxy against the reapers? Why did they even move the citadel, when they just let Shepard destroy/synthesize/dominate them? Why stop resisting so late? Or at all?

For me, the destroy ending was the logical conclusion:
The reapers have been committing genocides on a cosmic scale for practically ever. They make every "most evil in fiction" top ten list with ease.
I do not want to merge with that (and neither want I control it as a undead space dictator).
But - space magic is tricky - in doing so, I have to kill the Geth, which I just reunited with their logical partners, the Quarians. Sorry Legion, your selfless sacrifice was for naught, all Geth are dead anyway. And not to forget about EDI, who is a computer on a ship, but she also dies.

I wish ME had gotten the ending it deserved.

PS: I was wondering, if the Reapers harvest every civilization to conserve it, why do they all look like leviathan?

It's really frustrating how they orchestrated the whole story as a setup for that silly, pointless decision between bay or chloe. They abandoned everything, logic, common sense, most basic human behaviour like running away from a tornado, just so the player has to push left or right at the end.[...]

We got trolled, basically.

And it's such a glaring gap between this amazingly shallow set-up for a gut-punch and the rest of the story, the dialogs, the characters etc. I mean sure, it's a bit tropey all around but so good, too.

There is no way in hell that noone could see that gigantic f-6 hurricane incoming. So why the fricka-frack are there people down on the goshdarn shoreline eating lunch like YOLO. THERE IS NO WAY. There are ♥♥♥♥ing WHALES IN THE STREETS. NO ONE IS DOWN BY THE BEACH. Joyce should not have been there, Warren should not have been there. NOONE should have been there unless they were a cop making sure NOONE was still down there.

So I thought to myself, why are there people here. Then it dawned on me. Its a moral thing. Something is going to happen that ties in all these dumb♥♥♥♥♥ still hanging around town while the world is ending. Poor. Sloppy. Lazy. PLOT DEVICES. FFS.

Let's stay with this plot device thing - throughout the whole story our heroine Max can manipulate time, and does so primarly to help or save other people. We never learn why or how she got her power, but she had visions about the end of the world (or at least Arcadia Bay, the city where the game takes place) before.
But in the end she suddenly learns her power is the (only) reason for this tornado (from which nobody can flee, more on that in a moment). So, to stop it from happening, she has to - use her power one last time. We complain about the available endings in a moment, but this by itself does not make a lot of sense:
As said, she has visions of the tornado, before she got her powers. And other people (Nathan Prescott, his father, Kate, maybe even more I have missed) know about the coming tornado or at least have some impending sense of doom, but - so far as we know - do not have super powers.That Warren gets the whole "Superpowers cause superstorm" thing so fast, but still does not run either, raises questions too, to say the least.
Here (http://steamcommunity.com/app/319630/di ... 8444222200) is even more to this effect.

On user postulates the theory, that the Tornado is destined to happen, and the only thing that can prevent it, is Chloe dying at that point in time and space - Chaos theory (there is, after all, a butterfly present). http://steamcommunity.com/app/319630/di ... 8444488473
Could be. But it brings new problems: The Tornado is then no magic thingie, therefore it should have been predicted by weatherservice and everybody should get out in time. Even more, Max could (ab)use her superpowers, save Chloe nonetheless and then have the freaking city evacuated. The choice Chloe or City would not make any sense any more. Well, not that it makes that much sense to begin with.

So far, so bad. What about the endings? Don't worry, they are not any better.

Either sacrifice your bestest friend ever (or love interest, depending on what you chose and how you interpret it) or sacrifice half a city (which for whatever reason did not have the common sense to flee from an incoming hurricane! After an explicable eclipse, and dead whales in the street nobody runs from a damn hurricane!).

For your bff you have jumped literally through time - multiple times. The whole episode, nay, most of the game was about saving her, again and again and again. And again.
So, we chose her - and what do we get?
The two teenage bffs drive off into the sunset through the trashed city. Your bff does not even mind to check up if her mother is lying dead in the street (not to mention almost everybody else, who you have met during the game, because most likely they all were too dumb to flee) or was saved nevertheless.
The whole montage is rather short and, again let me quote that post from above:

NO. No game. No DonTNod. NO. I didnt want a ♥♥♥♥ing Disney ending but the one we got? You can go ♥♥♥♥ yourselves with it. It was lazy. Halfassed. Hamfisted. Boring.

The other ending, where you sacrifice your bff/love of your life, is better in regard to cinematic quality. It is, btw, what she seems to want - and let's face it, it was probably the first really selfless thing she ever did. Here you see the stuff happen, towards which you have been working for quite some time - the bad guys going to jail and such. Then cemetery, burial and music. Does not sound exciting? Right you are, it isn't, but still way better than the other ending (and better than ME3). (And it ignores all decisions we ever made during the whole game. As does the other ending, see below.)

Nevertheless, there is a huge plothole there:
So Super Max travels back to the point in time and space, where and when she got her superpowers. (Or, more likely, the first moment, where she realizes, she has them - if that makes any difference). Let's ignore, that she had visions of the future (!) before (!!).
When she returns, she still has her memories (there never was any explanation, how or if her memory works when she timejumps, just that she forgets everything after a while.)

So she knew exactly what was coming and could have saved Chloe without using (or "awakening") her superpower. As she also knew, the principal would not believe her.
She could have taken a picture of Nathan with the gun. Knocked him out, and told Chloe where the dark room was before she forgot etc.
Come on, Super Max, you could save your bestest friend/love of your life. Put a little oomph in it! At least try!
It was never convincing for me, that Chloe must die to stop the storm - Max not having/using superpowers - ok, I can take that. But that and Chloe dead? Sorry, Plot device. Bad Plot device. The kind of bad plot device which at the ending can easily ruin the whole story.

Here (http://steamcommunity.com/app/319630/di ... 431675940/) someone argues, that the sacrifice would end in an eternal time loop anyway. While their arguments are convincing, the solution is simple: time travel magic. We have seen that before, haven't we?
And let's not forget, we were promised, that our choices mattered. Both endings erase almost all the choices we ever made - either by going back in time and having a fixed story or by killing off everybody we've met - the only choice that remains, is whether Max x Chloe is a romance or just friendship.

That there will be no happy ending was clear from the start. And considering the history of the Mad Max franchise and the setting, one should not be too surprised, that it is that bad.
Max finds the persons, who were about to become his surrogate family (Hope and Glory - fitting names, btw) killed, and kills the only friend he made (Chumbucket, although their relationship has been strained towards the end of the game).
After revisiting his trauma, he is even more damaged than before (if that's even possible) and drives on - alone as before.

Before I complain about the writing, I'd like to say, that many, many open world games (yes, Bethesda, I am looking at both the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series) suffer from bad storytelling. Mad Max is no exception. That does not necessarily mean, that the stories are bad. Mad Max's story probably could have been more convincing (and therefore better) if was told better.

Max is about to travel to a place called Planes of Silence, where he hopes to find peace from his troubled past (I always thought, they were a metaphor for death). He looses his car, makes an enemy of some Warlord named Scrotus and meets Chumbucket. He is the (sole?) adherent to a crazy religion about cars and believes it's his sacred duty to build a great car, named Magnum Opus. So they help each other to build and improve this car. Important to mention is, that Chumbucket is an essential gameplay mechanic (scnr) - he repairs the car, brings it if needed, operates various guns etc. Also he is with Max most of the times.

The game is unclear, whether Max is supposed to be a ruthless survivalist or just a hardened survivor with a good heart or if he changes from one to the other. Eg you can have him give water to the needy, or help random bystanders, but most story mission he only does when he is expecting something in return. To Hope and Glory it is shown that he warms up a little, most likely because they remind him of his own family, whom he lost.
Towards the end of the game he tells Chumbucket he is about to leave him behind, but will take the car (which Chum built and worships) with him. Chum is hurt and drives with the car away from danger, but is captured by the warlord and under torture tells about Hope and Glory, who are promptly killed. Chum & Max & the car reunite nonetheless and attack the Warlord.
At this point, Max could have already left for the Planes of Silence - he did not need Chum anymore, and he is not attached to anybody anyway. But for whatever reasons he feels compelled to kill the evil warlord.
Towards the end of the battle, he rams the warlord's rig with the Magnum Opus. This kills Chum, too, but Max does not mind. Theroetically Chum could have jumped off, like Max did, but it was clear he would want to die with the car.
Besides that is not very nice to kill Chum, it is kinda absurd that Max jumps out - the attack is supposed to kill the warlord and destroy his own car, so Max was to die in the wasteland anyway. But on the other hand, he has survived in the wasteland before.

So, it is rather inconsistent, what Max is supposed to be and why he is doing most of what he does. Maybe with more storytelling it would be better, but personally I do not find a man who kills the only one who has helped him for the whole game, very likable.
Or with more player choice: With some of the encounters (eg giving water to those of are about to die of thirst), you are given choice, what to do and what man Max is. But with the story defining ones - primarly killing Chum - you cannot chose.

Borderlands The Pre-Sequel is the 3rd installment in the grindtastic RPG/FPS Crossover.
While it does not fix any of the problems the series had, it does not bring anything noteworthy new to the table.

But here we discuss the story:
In this game you work for the guy, who becomes the Big Bad of Borderlands 2: a sociopathic murderer, who has enslaved his daughter, but here he just shows his murdering, sociopathic side, no family backstory. You fight against a group which aims to destroy the planet. After killing them you learn, they only wanted to do so, to keep the power hidden there to fall into the wrong hands - exactly those hands which you have been working for. In the end the characters from the first (and one from the third) game prevent the worst, but the bad guy still murders the CEO of one of the big bad companys and becomes the new CEO there.
Also the story is neither funny or enthralling.

But it is 2016, so every AAA-title has to have at least a season pass and other DLC. And so does this game. Most DLC ist just more characters, because, hey, it's a really longwinding and partly boring game, with a lot of grinding, so everybody dreams of paying extra, so you can play the whole thing again with another character.

But let's quickly talk about the only relevant DLC, which is (again) about Claptrap, the iconic and idiotic robot-mascot of the franchise. Gameplaying-wise the DLC is better than the rest of the game and it has a few nice and funny ideas. But it ends with the above mentioned bad guy killing Claptrap, who also is a possible character to play, while his teammates stand by and laugh it him being (almost) killed.
Bad Ending.

Dying Light takes the best of Dead Island and Mirrors Edge and blends it together into a great package.
But here we talk about story.

The game takes places during - very original - a (localised) zombie apocalypse.
In Dying Light, the player character is some sort of agent and has to find a traitor in a city full of zombies. But he sides with the people fighting for survivial there etc. In the end, he kills some bad guy, but most of the people he got close to die. And no way to stop the zombies.

In the standalone dlc sequel The Following, he travels to the countryside around the city looking for a cure.
In the end, you have a decision, but all end with him dying. In one ending, the city is nuked, so everything you did was for naught, everyone you saved is dead, but at least the zombies are gone.

(There is a third part coming, so I guess the canonical ending will be, when he turns into some sort of super zombie).